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PCExpo 2000 July 3, 2000 NEW YORK CITY: Wireless. Easy. Handheld. Connected. These were the words we heard again and again during PC Expo 2000 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center last week. The show fills the Center and showcases the developments that will change the way we live, work and play in the very near future. Here’s a small glimpse of what’s coming: The Internet Appliance. A dedicated device that’s ultra-easy to use and connects you to the Internet for e-mail, information, shopping and all those other items the Internet offers. The i-Opener from Netpliance automatically checks for e-mail and downloads other current information such as weather, travel info, entertainment, special offers and more–-several times daily. If you have e-mail, a little red light at the top of the display blinks. Similar offerings are coming from Intel as Dot.Station and from 3-Com as Ergo. They all feature single-button access to features, and the Intel device has a built-in phone. Staying connected is carried even further in the 3-Com Digital Home, a townhouse that’s filled with networked wired and wireless devices. We toured the home and saw multiple connected cameras throughout the home that can be accessed from any computer to see what the baby is up to, check the front door and wherever. Even away from home, you can still access those cameras via the Internet to check what’s happening or carry on a videophone conversation with the family. The phones and entertainment center also connect to create a home information center for world info via access to the Internet. Digital Photography. The market is expanding in every direction: for the causal photographer, there are simple point and shoot cameras and new printers with unbelievable picture quality. Some printers can use the memory chip directly from the camera, so there’s no computer needed. Polaroid is introducing a line of PhotoMAX Fun! cameras that are easy for anyone to use. Priced from less than $100 and available soon in drug, grocery and discount stores. New, easy photo editing software, Photogenetics from QBeo, takes the pain out of optimizing your digital photos. At the prosumer end, the new Kodak DC 4800 digital camera offers more exposure control and faster boot and upload times, with amazing color quality. A new camera from Sony, the Mavica MVC-CD1000, records up to 500 pictures on a removable mini-recordable CD-R and is readable on standard CD-ROM drives. Printers: Xerox introduced the DocuPrint M750, which has superb photo quality, ink-saving cartridges and fast printing. Kodak, Epson and Canon also introduced new printers designed for printing terrific quality photos. The new high end printers from Epson cross over into the professional market, with gorgeous prints that are archival quality. Hand Helds. Palm hand held PDAs (personal digital assistants) continue to be extremely popular. The Palm OS (operating system) is now licensed to several other manufacturers, the most notable of which is Handspring and its Visor. The Palm and the Visor can each be expanded for other uses, and both have licensed thousands of developers to work on expansion devices. These devices include phone line modems and wireless devices for connecting to the Internet for e-mail and all the other Internet information. And Kodak just introduced the PalmPix, which turns your Palm into a digital camera. Take a picture and send it back to the office or to family or friends. The Geode from Geodiscovery, incorporates a GPS (global positioning system) receiver so you can display your current location on a map on your PDA. There are also bar code scanners, dictionaries, word processors, e-book readers and much more. Keynoters. The three keynote speakers all offered predictions of the future of computing: Jeff Hawkins, Founder and Chairman of Handspring, predicts that hand held devices will be the most common item people carry and that more people will access the Internet wirelessly from these devices than from desktop computers. Jeffrey Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com demonstrated the increasing use of personalization in Internet shopping. For instance, when you log on to Amazon.com, you will be offered a selection of new books and products that are similar to those you’ve ordered in the past. Ray Kurzweil, forerunner of speech recognition and artificial intelligence, charted the explosive growth of technology and how computing power will match the human brain within the next several decades. Possibly frightening thoughts in some ways, but these are personal predictions. It is clear to us, however, that technology is moving rapidly and the future looks bright and challenging. |
